Maybe its just me, but when I hear about a city declaring parking ticket amnesty, I get all flustered and irate. The latest is Detroit. They are going to give a 30% discount to any ticket more than three years old if you pay it by May 15. Read all about it here.
Then the city is going to get tough on scofflaws, by golly. They are going to boot, tow, and impound. They are going to collect the money due them. After six tickets your car is gone in Motor City.
Does anyone honestly believe that they are really going to get ‘tough.” I don’t. They haven’t been ‘tough’ up to now. What’s changed? And then there’s “Amnesty.”
The politicos in Detroit must have felt that raising parking fees and getting “tough” was going to cause them some problems with their constituents, so they softened the blow by telling three year scofflaws that they could reduce their fees and penalties by a third if they pay up. Right.
It seems to me that ‘amnesty’ comes about when the ‘powers at be’ simply don’t enforce existing laws and then people break them in larger and larger numbers and then the amnesty comes into play so they don’t have to enforce the laws now.
My solution is to close the border, completely, send anyone convicted of a felony back to the country they came from, and then forget about everything else. In a few years, the problem has taken care of itself. No, wait. That’s a different amnesty.
JVH
